


full bloom

by poppyseedheart



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Aromantic Characters, Desert, F/F, M/M, Magic, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21913525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppyseedheart/pseuds/poppyseedheart
Summary: There's a tug in Jenna's heart. Like something is saying hello.Hi, she thinks back, a little giddy. It never stops being amazing when a ritual goes right. There's a moment, right after they figure it out, where everything goes golden and warm, a breath where the whole world seems to stop turning.The light slowly fades, and Jenna turns around to find Simone beaming. "Welcome," she drawls, waving a dramatic, sweeping hand across the landscape. "Pretty good, right?"
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill, Simone de Rochefort/Jenna Stoeber
Comments: 18
Kudos: 54
Collections: Polygolidays Gift Exchange 2019!





	full bloom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thermocline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thermocline/gifts).

> Hello thermocline!
> 
> Happy holidays! I hope you like this fic about witchery - your prompt was amazing and I snatched it up immediately. A couple minor content warnings: there are allusions to child neglect, and some mentions of blood magic (Simone alludes to sacrifice as a joke at one point) but no actual blood magic.
> 
> Enjoy! <3

"Are you sure this is the right place?" asks Pat. He's leaning forward in the passenger seat and peering dubiously at their surroundings. 

Admittedly, Jenna thinks, hands steady on the steering wheel, their surroundings are a little dubious. They'd gone from a densely populated cityscape to suburbs to...this, sparse shrubbery and sharp silhouettes of cacti and mountains against the setting sun. It's beautiful, but not an especially promising location in which to find their AirBnB. "It says we're still thirty minutes out," she reminds him. 

"Anyone else think we're about to get murdered?" wonders Brian from the backseat.

Simone, seated next to him, hits him in the shoulder. "Even if we are, we don't have to attract that to ourselves, asshole."

"No one's gonna murder us," sighs Jenna. Sometimes it's like wrangling children with these three. It reminds her sometimes of her favorite kind of classes, with students who cared and hung around after to tell her about their research and wanted to hear more about her life outside of school. 

"How do you know that?" Pat challenges, shaking his head so his hair falls out of his eyes.

Jenna grins at him. "Because I'll murder them first."

No one has any retort for that, likely because they believe her. Just after that, they pass through a small town, and stop for a bathroom break and some more groceries, just in case. As they all pile back into the car, Simone swaps with Brian to sit behind Jenna, and starts massaging her neck. Jenna sighs happily and tries to relax a little.

They've been driving for nearly three hours when Jenna spots a cabin sitting alone in the distance. "Well," she says, taking in the way the moonlight is cutting across the wooden planes of the house, "that's not ominous at all."

Simone snorts, her hand still resting at Jenna's nape. "Any check-in instructions?"

"I have the code for the front door. Otherwise, just the same as everywhere else. No magic between two and six, and try to keep the noise down after eleven."

"Who's gonna put in a noise complaint?" asks Pat as Jenna pulls up to the dirt driveway. He's the first out of the car, stretching his arms over his head until something in one of his shoulders pops. As it does, a little spark shoots from one of his hands, and he smiles back at the car ruefully. "Sorry," he says, "got a little backed up. Nowhere for it to go."

Brian follows him, stretching too but without any flashiness. "Showoff," he shoots at Pat, who just smiles placidly at him. "'Nowhere for it to go', ha— not all of us can just do that, Mister I Grew Up In The Middle of Nowhere and Did Magic All the Time Without Repercussions."

"Oh my _god_," complains Simone. She's gotten out of the car, too, leaving Jenna inside gathering her things with the driver's side door open to let in the cool desert air of the evening. "If I have to listen to you two and your sexually charged bickering for the entire time we're here, I'm going to sacrifice myself in a blood ritual."

"Simone—"

"I'm not joking, Patrick! Don't test me!"

Jenna starts unloading their bags from the back, feels more than sees the others come over to hover behind her. She starts handing things off blindly, expecting that they'll be grabbed, and they are. This is by far the smallest coven Jenna has ever been part of, and one of the smallest she's ever seen that didn't splinter to pieces in a few weeks. It's also her home, and she loves it. Loves them with her whole dark heart, and knows they love her too, even when they snip like this.

As she walks to the door, hefting a duffle over each shoulder, Simone walks up to join her, and she hears Brian and Pat quietly talking a few feet back.

Jenna opens the door with the code she'd been given, and opens the door just as Brian grins sunnily and nudges Pat with his shoulder.

Pat smiles back, and things are righted again.

The inside of the cabin is nothing special, and no different from the photos they'd looked through before booking. It's made almost entirely of mid-toned wood, robust and sturdy-looking, and the kitchen is small but, upon inspection, well-stocked with pots and pans and dishes and silverware. They start unloading groceries first, appropriate things in the freezer and then the fridge, and then filling the pantry. They're only here for a week and a half, but ten days is more than enough time to need options, and Simone is capable of putting away more food than you'd expect just by looking at her.

Jenna heads to the bedrooms next, finds two as expected, each with two double beds. Jenna dumps her stuff on the one nearest the door and heads back out into the living room to find Simone and Pat piled onto one of the couches flipping through channels. Brian is putting up some protection wards on the walls.

Jenna doesn't have the heart to tell him there's no way they'll need them, so she just pats him once on the shoulder and leans over the back of the couch. "I'm hungry," she whines, directly into Pat's ear.

Pat flinches, ticklish there, which is never not funny, and gets up with a dramatic and heaving sigh. "What would you like, your highness?"

Jenna asks for tator tots and a smoothie, and Pat pulls out the box and bag of frozen fruit and tosses them onto the counter. While he works, Jenna steals his spot on the couch, leaning her head onto Simone's shoulder. Simone runs her long fingers through Jenna's short hair, over and over, gentle until Jenna is too drowsy to keep her eyes open.

"Is she asleep?" asks Pat, incredulous.

"Nah," says Jenna drowsily. Simone shifts to trace over Jenna's eyebrows, down the bridge of her nose. "G'na sleep if you keep doin' that, though."

Simone flicks her lightly on the forehead, and Jenna scrunches up her face. "I didn't say you should stop."

"Please," says Pat, "please don't make me make a smoothie no one's going to drink."

"I'll drink it," pipes up Brian.

Jenna smiles. "Brian's my new favorite."

Simone sighs as if affronted, but she goes back to tracing that soft hand over Jenna's scalp, and Jenna really doesn't stand a chance.

/

When Jenna was fourteen years old, she burned down her family's shed. She didn't mean to, but it happened, and then Jenna was forced to wear gloves until she burned those up, too. Her parents took her to the doctor, disbelieving, afraid, and Jenna's mother cried in the waiting room. They didn't go back with her when the nurse called Jenna over, and they didn't speak to her at all on the car ride home until the very end, when Jenna was focusing her entire mind on not bursting into flames.

"You need treatment, the doctor said," her mother told her, looking straight ahead. Her voice wavered but her hands never shook. "How do you feel about going away for the summer, sweetheart?"

"Um," Jenna had answered, nervous and unsure. "Where?"

"Seattle, honey. Wouldn't that be nice?"

Jenna did not know anything about Seattle, other than that it was hundreds of miles away and it rained a lot there. "Yeah," she said anyway, because she knew they weren't really asking.

So at age fourteen, Jenna made a trip to Washington State alone, one checked bag and a backpack on her back.

And she never saw her parents again, after that.

/

An indeterminate amount of time later, Jenna is shaken awake, and she grumbles against it but opens her eyes all the same. It's still dark out, so she doesn't think she's been out for too long, and Brian's face is about two inches from her face. "Hi," he whispers.

Jenna shoves at him. "Personal space, dude."

Brian snorts and lets himself be pushed. "You should probably go to bed. We thought you'd wanna brush your teeth and change and stuff. Or at least take your shoes off."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going." Jenna's been maneuvered so that she was leaning against a pillow rather than Simone's body, and she gets oriented again as she sits up properly. "Time's it?"

"Just passed one."

"Ugh. Okay, yeah. And we're up at five?"

"Just until six, but yeah."

Jenna groans wordlessly and hoists herself up and off of the couch. Brian brings a hand, nervous, to steady her by the arm, and pulls away as soon as she's righted and doesn't seem at risk of tripping again.

He's like a skittish colt, and Jenna aches, just a little, before squaring her shoulders and turning to him. "Hey," she says.

Brian's eyes are wide in the moonlight. "Yeah?"

"Nothing's gonna hurt you here."

He laughs a little, surprised, but the tension in his shoulders doesn't ease. "It's fine," he says, something weird behind his voice. "If they tried, we'd just— we're fine. We're fine?"

"Yeah," says Jenna. "Yeah, Brian, we're fine. Get some sleep, okay? You look exhausted."

Another small laugh, more a huff of air than anything. "I am, thanks."

"Sleep," says Jenna again firmly, and steers the both of them down the hall to the bedrooms. Brian walks into the one he and Pat are sharing, and Jenna peels off opposite him to enter her own. Simone is asleep already, hair a dark splash against the pale blue pillowcase. Jenna grabs just her toiletry pouch from her bag and disappears into the bathroom to scrub at her face, floss, brush her teeth while her own sleepy eyes stare back at her in the mirror.

She returns to her room and sees, again, Simone's gangly posture, body lax. 

After Jenna shuts the door all the way behind her she can't see anything at all.

/

Jenna kind of wants to die when Simone's alarm starts blaring at 5AM. Simone, apparently feeling the same way, wails a little, flapping a hand around blindly to try to turn it off. She manages, eventually, and then the room is silent, only darkness spilling in through the window.

"Hell is a welcome ritual," mutters Simone, head thunking back against the pillow before she seems to thrust her legs over the side of her bed by sheer power of will. 

"We gotta," replies Jenna, but she's far from disagreeing.

Simone pats absently at Jenna’s shin as she walks past, mumbling something about putting a pot of coffee on. Jenna allows herself just one more minute of lying down before she follows, pulling her duvet with her because it's still chilly. It must look awkward and ungainly wrapped around her shoulders the way it is, but she can't bring herself to care right now.

Jenna almost bumps into Pat in the hallway. He looks a little more awake than her, but that's just Pat. He's been like this as long as Jenna has know him—careful with how he holds himself, never vulnerable or soft around the edges. Pat walks around like someone who knows he's being watched, which is ironic considering the accusations of irresponsibility Brian likes to level at him when one or both of them are feeling prickly. Pat is often a portrait in a frame, and it's not an accident that he comes across that way.

Jenna follows him outside quietly, not bothering to take off her slippers and change into sturdier shoes. It won't really matter in a minute, anyway.

Simone stumbles out with a mug of coffee soon after, and then Brian appears with his hair an absolute _riot_. "Don't laugh," he says, though it's too late. Simone is cackling, one hand braced on Pat's shoulder.

"Oh," she says breathlessly, wiping a tear from her eye, "oh my god, you just made this whole thing worth it."

Brian does seem a little annoyed, but more than that he looks amused, mouth pulling up into a smile to mirror Simone's. "Glad to be of service," he says drily. "So are we doing this, or...?"

It's Brian's first welcome ritual. Jenna knows that, but she doesn't think the others do. And, she's sure, Brian would rather have it that way, so she doesn't mention it outright as they start setting up.

Simone starts, as she always will with this kind of ritual, with her hands pressed flat against the earth. She's kicked off her shoes, feet pressed down too, and doesn't seem cold in her long, dramatic nightgown despite the way Jenna is shivering in three times the layers. Up above, the moon is a half moon, which isn't ideal for this kind of ritual but really could be worse. A half moon is neutral, doesn't absorb energy from rituals like this but doesn't reflect it back, either. Honestly, it's probably best for Brian to see it like this before he sees the rest of what they have planned.

They’re far enough from the house that they shouldn’t do any damage to the foundations, so Jenna isn’t worried as she watches Simone work.

Simone digs her nails in, and the packed earth beneath them cracks open with a thunderous boom.

Brian flinches. Jenna grins. Pat applauds politely.

Simone keeps pushing, and then suddenly her arms are buried up to her elbows, hands still reaching. Jenna has seen this before, but it never stops being incredible how focused Simone gets like this. The rest of the world may as well not exist for all the attention she pays it, instead shutting her eyes and _feeling_.

When Jenna shuts her eyes and feels, people get hurt. They scream, they run. But Simone is a creationist before she is anything else. 

Light begins to spill from the crack, bathing Simone as she squeezes her eyes shut even more tightly.

"Wow," says Brian, very, very quietly.

Pat just nods. He's not joking anymore. Jenna sees his hands twitching at his sides and urges him forward with a gentle nudge to his back. "You're up, tall man."

"Tall man," repeats Pat, like he has something to say, but he doesn't. He just walks up to where Simone is now kneeling over the ground and presses his hands next to hers.

The crack erupts with light, so bright both Jenna and Brian have to turn away, and even still Jenna feels her eyes water and tears spill over her cheeks. There's a tug in her heart. Like something is saying hello.

Hi, she thinks back, a little giddy. It never stops being amazing when a ritual goes right. There's a moment, right after they figure it out, where everything goes golden and warm, a breath where the whole world seems to stop turning.

The light slowly fades, and Jenna turns around to find Simone beaming. "Welcome," she drawls, waving a dramatic hand across the landscape, sweeping. "Pretty good, right?"

"Your best one yet," says Jenna honestly. "I wonder if there's a version of this one we can all help out with."

"I mean," says Brian, brushing away his own tears, which Jenna suspects are not all from the brightness of the light, "that's why we're here, isn't it? To test that stuff out?"

Jenna nods. "Of course, yeah. We need to sit down together and look at all the things we wanna try before we leave. But first, I need to back to sleep or I'm gonna fall over."

"You can sleep after that?" asks Brian, a little too loud and incredulous to be casual.

Pat laughs and ruffles Brian's hair. "Best sleep of your life. Or your money back."

"I think I'm gonna stay outside for a minute," says Brian, squinting suspiciously at Pat. "Y'all can go inside."

Jenna hesitates, and Simone catches her eye. "I'll wait with him," says Simone. "You guys sleep. We'll be in in a minute."

It's a good compromise. Jenna just hopes Simone goes easy on him. "Don't catch frostbite," she says, looking dubiously at Simone's outfit, but doesn't otherwise protest.

Simone shimmies her shoulders, winking at her. Jenna definitively does _not_ look at Simone's chest. That's a crisis for another day. "You got it, boss. Brian won't let me freeze, right?"

Brian nods, apparently resigned to not staying outside for as long as he'd been hoping to. Smart move by Simone. Jenna wishes she'd thought of it herself, but that's why coven leaders have seconds, anyway. For this kind of thing. Support, and all. 

God, Jenna's tired.

She and Pat head back inside, and Jenna can't help herself from one last quick affirmation. "You guys were awesome," she tells Pat. "Imagine what we could do if we collaborated on everything."

"All I did was make your eyes burn," says Pat, brushing it off with a dismissive hand, but Jenna catches the little pleased expression behind his face. 

"Sure," says Jenna.

"Goodnight," answers Pat.

She grins, punching him in the arm. "Night. See you in the morning."

"No earlier than ten," begs Pat, and Jenna laughs.

"Obviously."

Jenna hits the sack again, and falls asleep in seconds for the third time that night, except this time she holds the glowy joy in her chest as close as she can, remembering Simone's hands in the earth, Brian next to her with his shoulders shaking, Pat and his easy, brittle confidence. The memory keeps her warm against the cool, dry Arizona air until it's time to wake up again.

/

They hit the books the next morning, shoulder to shoulder in the dining room. Brian had gone wide-eyed over the tomes when Simone had pulled them out—_Wowee, are you sure those aren't prop books for a production of Macbeth?_—and still seems like he's feeling a little overwhelmed. It's only been a couple of months, Jenna reminds herself. He'd been taught his whole life to be afraid of himself.

Jenna can relate to that in her own way, so she looks out for him. Stops Simone and Pat from ganging up on him too much (though she suspects Brian secretly likes the attention) and tugs him closer to her side.

"What am I looking for?" Brian asks, turning page after thick page in the dusty book. "Anything in particular? Or just places we could add in extra people."

"Honestly," mutters Simone, "I'm always surprised that covens survive with just specialists. You'd think it would be unsustainable, but we're all just out here pretending like losing the wrong member wouldn't bring even the strongest coven right to its knees. It's kinda fucked up when you think about it."

Pat nods. "When my uncle passed a few years ago it totally crushed their coven. My aunt stopped practicing after that." There's a heavy silence, even having heard the story before, and then Pat seems to shake it off. "Brian, we're looking for any ritual that doesn't specify a single caster."

Brian makes a little _ohhh_ acknowledgement and starts flipping through the tome with a bit more gusto. He has his tongue stuck between his teeth in a frankly rather cute fashion, and he keeps making sounds to himself like he doesn't realize he's doing it.

Jenna switches over to watching Pat, who is also looking at Brian. Jenna jots down a quick note on a scrap of paper and slides it over to him.

Pat opens it up and reads, _Can see those heart eyes from space, son_, before looking at Jenna with a deadpan expression. "Ha, ha," he intones.

"What?" asks Simone, looking between them with narrowed eyes. "What secrets are you sharing?"

"Nothing," says Pat, at the same time as Jenna answers, "I'll tell you later."

Pat looks betrayed, but Jenna doesn't feel bad when she sees how pleased Simone's smile goes.

Brian, oblivious to all of this, only looks up to ask, "Hey, Jenna? Do you think something like this could work?" She walks around the table to him and finds him pointing at a diagram of monkshood being ground in mortar and pestle. The ritual is for purifying water, simple and useful, though not the easiest way to do it that Jenna can think of. Still, it's an instantaneous and discrete effect, unlike luck rituals or anything requiring long brewing times, which makes it perfect for the kind of experimentation they want to do here.

"Definitely," she says.

Brian smiles. "Gold star for me," he sing-songs. "Can I put a Post-It in this?"

Jenna tilts her head. "I mean, yes? Why wouldn't you be able to?"

Brian shrugs. "Feels wrong." He holds the page he was on between his first finger and his thumb, waving it around gently for emphasis. "I don't know, the juxtaposition of this, like, _ancient_ text and my hot pink sticky notes makes my brain want to break."

Jenna glances at all of their phones on the kitchen counter and snorts. "I promise you get used to it."

"I mean," answers Brian with a small sigh, "it's not like I just discovered magic two weeks ago, though. I grew up with it. I always knew it was there. I just didn't... practice."

"It wasn't safe for you," says Jenna.

Pat and Simone are doing an admirable job of pretending not to be listening, despite sitting just a couple of feet away at the same table. When Brian buries his face in his hands, though, overwhelmed by some memory he's not sharing, Simone tugs gently on a lock of his hair and then starts rubbing his shoulder. "There's nothing to be embarrassed about," she says. "Do you know how much of a mess I was when Jenna found me? I was practically feral."

A begrudging laugh from Brian. He looks up, and his eyes are dry, clear. Jenna takes a relieved breath in and continues the story. "It's kind of true, actually. She tried to bury me alive in dirt in the middle of the woods."

"What?" asks Pat. "No way, you guys never told me that."

"Sorry," says Simone, mostly to Jenna, at the same time that Jenna says, "Actually, it was kinda hot."

"_No,_" gasps Brian, scandalized.

Jenna breaks into guffaws, has to wipe at her eyes to stop the tears of mirth from dripping onto the book she and Brian had been leaning over. "It was mostly terrifying but obviously she didn't scare me off _that_ badly if we ended up like this."

Simone rolls her eyes dramatically and goes back to turning the pages, long nails tracing over lines of text, and Jenna quietly instructs Brian to write down a copy of the ritual he'd been looking at before putting a sticky note to mark the page and moving on. _You belong here with us,_ she's telling him without making a scene.

Brian nods, does as she says, and gives no indication that he's heard.

/

Jenna met Simone when she was twenty-two years old and just finishing up her last year of undergrad. She'd been assigned a field work study for one of her last projects in her Botany course, and the experiment had led her to the woods just outside of Bellingham. It had, maybe unsurprisingly, poured heavily the week before, but on that day everything was clear, the earth rich, the flora in full bloom. Jenna had taken it all in with wide eyes. She would never truly get used to the way things grew here, thirsty and flourishing and well-fed.

She'd been looking up and around so much that she almost didn't notice when she ran into a young woman lying on the trail up ahead. "Oh!" she said to herself, scanning the area for other people or a camp or anything that would justify her presence here. The girl had been wearing a dress, torn. Jenna remembers it well. "Are you okay?"

"Why are you here?" the girl had rasped. She must have been younger than Jenna, though not by much. 

Jenna grimaced a little and held up the paper in her hand. "School assignment. I need to find a rare species of fern."

The girl was not impressed by that. At first, Jenna thought she was bracing herself to stand up when she put her palms flat against the ground, but then noticed that the dirt was crawling up the girl's arms, all the way to her elbows, seemingly without any source, like gravity had inverted itself at her whim.

Jenna remembers being terrified, then. But even more than that, she remembers the feeling of seeing yourself in someone else. "Wow," she'd said carefully, "that's really cool. What are you--"

That was all she got out before the ground beneath her opened up and a pit tried to swallow her whole. "Shit! Okay, Christ, hold on!" It had been years that her magic had lain dormant within her, but it only took one spark of panic for a neat circle of flames to fan out around the girl. "Stop it, okay?" tried Jenna, feeding the flames as much as she could without setting too much of the plant life around them ablaze. She can't imagine what her Botany professor would say if she came back to class not only with no evidence, but having to come up with an explanation as to why part of the incredibly remote woods had burned the exact same day she was there for research. "I don't want to hurt you. I promise. Can we talk?"

"Talk?" the girl had asked.

The pit stopped trying to bury Jenna within its claws, and she found herself able to stand almost comfortably in the middle of it. If the entire hole were to be caved in or filled with dirt, Jenna didn't think she'd be able to breathe. But she had been through enough already to know that she was not going to die like this. "Yeah, talk. I'm Jenna. I can do fire shit, and I'm here for a class. What about you?"

The girl squinted her eyes, tilted her head. "Simone," she finally said, slowly. "Earth shit. I live here."

"You live in the woods?"

"Well," amended Simone, "I don't live anywhere else."

"Do you often bury people alive?" asked Jenna, trying to decide if she was going to need to make a break for it as soon as she convinced Simone to help her out of here.

To her surprise, Simone laughed, loud and bright and sharp. "That's not what I was doing. That— wow. I made a really horrible impression, huh?"

Jenna smiled back hesitantly. "Well, a little. I won't hold it against you, though."

"Thanks," said Simone drily. With every moment that passed she seemed more and more like a lost person and less like a frightened animal.

"When you said you don't live anywhere, though... I don't mean to pry, but these aren't the coolest digs I've ever seen."

"Digs," Simone said under her breath with a wry smile. "No, it's not great. My coven, um— they, you know. Anyway, this is just temporary until I find something, but people keep entering my space and I really am having trouble with that."

"Don't like being crowded?"

Simone began untangling her hair with her fingers, grimacing when she caught a knot and working through it slowly but with determination. "It's not that so much as I'm not very good at sharing. I'm starting to realize that some of the things I learned in my last coven might not have been the healthiest."

"You escaped," said Jenna.

A pause. Simone stopped running her fingers through her hair and squared her shoulders. "How'd you know?"

"Like recognizes like," was all that Jenna had said then. "I'm a runaway too."

Two weeks later, Simone was living with Jenna, paying rent from her inheritance, apparently, and job searching through any unofficial channels she could find. This was when she told Jenna that it wasn't just 'earth shit' that she could do, but blood magic, too. And blood magic was valuable. She could make a pretty penny if she was intentional about it. Another coven hired Simone over to do some work for them, which flared jealousy hot in Jenna's chest, and she thought, _Can I really live without magic for the rest of my life?_

And she saw the way Simone lit up during moonlit rituals, saw the energy coursing through her as easy as anything, and said, aloud, "What if we started a new coven of our own? A better one?"

Simone, to her credit, had not laughed. She'd simply tilted her head and said, "Just the two of us? Awfully small."

"Cozy," Jenna corrected, but she was saying so much more than that. She was thinking of the possessive feeling in her gut, and the way Simone made Jenna want to run in the woods at night to scream, and the connection she felt to an ancestry she had always been taught to feel ashamed of. This was different. This was better and scary and the precipice of a goddamn revolution inside of Jenna's heart.

Simone, against all odds, got the message.

/

That afternoon finds the coven sitting out on the porch and soaking in the dregs of sun that have managed to fight their way through the clouds. "I don't know why we picked winter for this," Pat complains, rubbing his hands together. "Why not, like, May?"

"Ah," drawls Simone, "yes, _May, _the best time to cast rituals. The May solstice is my favorite of all the solstices, personally. Brian?"

"Mine's April," he answers promptly. "I love it when a little rain comes through to really get the party started."

Pat groans. "You're both horrible. Why did I join this coven?"

"Honestly, Jenna," recites Jenna, mostly from memory, "I don't think I even knew what it was like to have a completely supportive coven before I met you. When I was younger, it was all about competition, but you both really care about each other, and I'd kill to be part of something—"

"Mercy," begs Pat, shoving her in the shoulder. "Oh my god, I can't catch a break."

"Pat, you don't have to be afraid of your feelings," says Brian, and it seems like he's only mostly joking. He shifts in his chair, scooting over so that he and Pat are closer together. "We love you too."

Pat buries his face in his hands and replies, muffled, "Shut up."

"Aww," simpers Simone, patting him on the head. Pat doesn't move, continuing to quietly bemoan his choice of coven. "Jenna, dear," continues Simone, "are we trying that ritual Brian found tonight? Because if we are, we should start brewing the chamomile now."

Jenna gets up and stretches, feels something pop in her shoulder. "I'm on it."

She meanders into the kitchen alone and pulls out the teabags, finding a 2 quart pan in a cabinet beneath the silverware drawer and pulling it out. She fills it with water, turns on the gas, and lights the stove with a flick of her hands. _Showoff_, her friends would say, but there's no one to show off for. It just feels good to flex her magic sometimes, and to use it for fun.

Jenna had very rarely found magic fun before Simone, is all.

The water begins to boil after a minute or so, and Jenna brings down the heat before the fire starts warping anything or spreading beyond where it should be. It'd been hotter than the stove could produce, she's pretty sure, the boil settles easily enough, low and rolling, and Jenna allows it to come to a simmer before dropping in no less than eleven bags of tea.

It takes a while for anything to happen, even as she hums the tune that had been sketched out in the book and lovingly transcribed into something understandable by Brian over and over, stirring the pot with a wooden spoon that she's careful not to turn into a torch.

Eventually, though, the water begins to...

Sparkle isn't the right word. Jenna actually isn't sure what she'd call this effect, a sheen that only pops up when she looks at the right angle, a secret folded in between bubbles of air and the swirl of the teabags. Whatever it is, it's beautiful.

Whatever it is, it's magic.

"You ready in there?" calls Pat.

His clairvoyance is sometimes helpful, but usually annoying. "Yes," she calls back anyway. "I'll pour it, just give me a minute." Usually, she likes to do spells like this with traditional teapots, passed down in her family for generations, but she hadn't brought them. If she'd tried to bring everything she anticipated they _might_ need, they'd have had to load dozens of suitcases into the car, and that's a recipe for indecision and disaster. Better to keep it simple, anyway.

She brings out the cups of tea on a tray she found behind the fancy plates, which had been hidden away by the owner of this place but not well enough to escape Jenna's seeking eyes, hands.

"Thanks, Jenna," says Simone, knocking her tea back like a shot.

Brian boggles at her. "Didn't that burn?"

"Nah," Simone replies, grinning. "Jenna's got me, right Jenna?"

And sure, Jenna had expected Simone to do that, and so she'd pulled some of the heat out. Once she learned more about her ability, studied it beyond learning what her family had done before her, she'd developed an understanding so complete that she realized that heat works in both directions. Abundance and dearth, presence and absence.

Simone had taught her that you have to get so close to your power you're inside of it. Jenna hadn't known what that meant, before.

"I've got her," she says. "They should all be at a fine temperature to drink. Go on, sooner we do this sooner we can start."

Pat grabs a mug and drinks his, and Brian follows suit. Jenna takes a sip, and the flavor is potent but not unpleasant, the magic dulling the edges and softening the bitterness. 

"Next?" she asks the group once everyone has finished.

She knows what's next, but she wants to hear someone else take charge for this part. The look on all of their faces proves that they know what she's doing, and that they're amused by it. "Well," Simone says, an easy drawl, colored by her smirk, "next I think Brian and Pat are on deck together."

"Right," says Pat. "Brian handles the water, I'll handle the ritual."

"The water is part of the ritual," says Jenna.

Pat rolls his eyes. "Okay, Professor Stoeber. I'm handling logistics. Measurements, reading text, et cetera. This way, Brian can focus on what he's doing, and we can potentially imbue more power into it. Did I pass?"

"You pass," answers Jenna grandiosely. "Let's head upstairs, then."

They do the next part of the ritual in the bathtub in the second bathroom upstairs, off of Brian and Pat's room, which functions as the master in this cabin. It's a beautiful room, all warm wood and open floor plan. Jenna does remember the way Pat's face flushed when he saw the setup in the photos online, how he hadn't protested but still seemed nervous at the fact that the shower has no door. It's set deep enough around the corner of the room that no one will be able to see anything without really trying to, but when Jenna had asked him about it, he'd just stuttered something about the principle of the thing and told her it was no big deal, that he could handle it. Not to worry about him.

Sometimes, Jenna worries even more when Pat says that. He doesn't like attention on him, despite having an obvious fondness for performing in various capacities; he clams up when people want to know how he's doing. He plays everything off with jokes.

Jenna had thought, foolishly, that he was the most opaque person in terms of his emotions this clan could ever hope to have.

And then Brian had come along.

"I'll just start filling it, then," says Brian, focusing, brow furrowed seriously as his hands start to pick up an aura. It's faintly green this time, bluish only in undertone, and the faucet turns on without input. Or— water begins to flow from the faucet, pulled from the pipes, but Jenna's pretty sure there's no energy aside from Brian's own running through any of these systems. "What temperature, Pat Gill?"

"It just says room temperature," he says helpfully. "Um, I'd guess around..." He shuts his eyes for a second. "Seventy-three point four. Simone, did you turn the heater on again?"

"It's cold," Simone complains.

Jenna snorts. "Brian, you got that?"

"Yeah," says Brian, strained.

Jenna puts a hand on his shoulder. "You sure?"

"It's just precise," Brian grits out. A bead of sweat appears at his hairline, and the line of his back is tense through his t-shirt. "I'll be fine, I've done this before. I just need to focus. Could you guys, um, would you—"

"Do you mind stepping out for a second?" inserts Pat smoothly. He's all business now, anxiety wiped away in favor of focusing on Brian. On easing things for him.

Brian would not still be here if it weren't for Pat. Jenna believes that sincerely. 

She and Simone step out without protest, and Jenna shuts the door with a quiet click behind them. Simone leans against the wall, all long legs and graceful anarchy in every line of her body. "Bets on them blowing something up in the next five minutes?"

"Nah," says Jenna, "unless you're betting on it going badly. I think they're fine."

Simone blows some hair out of her face irritably. "Boring. Brian's new, he shouldn't be so good at this. Remember when you and I first tried to do a ritual together?"

Jenna laughs. "Yeah, I remember."

They didn't always know each other inside out. It's humbling, maybe, to remember where they started. After Simone moved in with her, after Jenna graduated by the skin of her teeth, after she started her masters and then finished it, after she taught for a fateful two years before going into witchery and book revisions and magical research full time. She almost burned Simone to death, once. It's a funny memory because it has to be, because the alternative makes Jenna cry and sit up at night with guilt thick in her blood.

Simone almost killed her too, to be fair. Jenna woke up one morning to Simone wide-eyed and apologetic and brushing dirt from her hair. "I didn't mean to," she'd been saying, over and over, teeth ragged over her chapped bottom lip, long fingers quick and dexterous and determined.

"What?" Jenna had asked blearily. Only weeks later did she pull the story from Simone, and learned that Simone had, mostly in her sleep, carried Jenna into a graveyard nearly a mile away and began to cast a ritual. It helped, she admitted, to have Jenna near. She didn't mean to put Jenna in danger. Didn't mean to let any of the dirt crawl up onto her hands, into her hair.

Jenna had picked dirt from beneath her fingernails for hours after that trying to figure out how it could be that not a single part of her was angry.

Now, standing across from Simone, Jenna looks at her and sees Simone, every version of her superimposed atop the others, her growth and her spirit and her vigor, her vintage clothes and her cackling laugh, her tears when she thinks no one's looking and her spine of steel that just dares people to hurt her family, and Jenna thinks she knows the answer.

"If this works," says Simone, "then we can end the week with a big one."

"A big one?" asks Jenna.

Simone nods. "Yeah, something bigger. I'm not sure what yet, haven't looked through the rest of the book I was working on, but I think there's gonna be something good in there. If you let me look, I'll have something for you by morning."

"Don't stay up all night," is all Jenna replies, tacit permission, and Simone winks at her.

Jenna makes a note to herself to remember to grab Simone before they all go to bed. A sleep-deprived Simone is not only cranky, but sometimes dangerous, and they need to be up early if they want to start something new tomorrow.

Inside, there's no sound, and then a quiet murmur. Pat's voice. Brian says something back. Jenna can't quite hear them, but she doesn't need to, trusts that they're doing what they need to to make this work. Jenna learned the hard way that a lack of trust is one of the more dangerous ways to run a coven.

She waits a few more minutes before knocking gently on the door. "Guys? How's it going?"

"Good," replies Brian, voice clear and ringing through the room. He sounds like magic, like success. "Give us one sec, we'll come right out."

"Give us one sec," mimics Simone quietly, mocking but fond, "we just gotta finish making out, and then we'll—"

Jenna smacks her, but she's laughing, too. "Give them a break. They're young and in love, it's beautiful."

Simone rolls her eyes. "Love is a scam."

"I guess," says Jenna. "But they can still enjoy it while it lasts, huh? Honeymoon period isn't forever."

"Dancing around each other is, though."

"That I can agree with."

Brian and Pat come out, then, door opening slowly as if they're nervous about what they're about to walk into. Jenna just watches them with a brow cocked. They don't seem guilty or rumpled or anything untoward, but Brian's cheeks are flushed, maybe from exertion, maybe from something else. Jenna stops speculating when Pat starts explaining.

"I think we nailed it," he says. There's a pleased smile on his face. "Brian kept everything really steady, and I read the incantations without an issue. Everything should be fine. We have to wait a few minutes to see if it actually took, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. It might even come out better than the results."

Jenna grins and pats them both genially on the arms. She receives twin smiles back. Not even Simone has a snarky comment in this moment, and they all take a moment to bask in a job well done.

"We're doing a big one," says Simone decisively. "That was good, so we're gonna finish up here with a bang."

"We have days left," protests Brian. "Just one big one?"

Simone laughs and stands up, stretching out of her lean and raising her fingertips up and letting them brush against the ceiling. One of her shoulders pops and her eyes flutter luxuriously. "We can do small ones," she replies. "If we want to be small fries. And have a bunch of little successes, and then go home. But we didn't rent out a cabin to mess around with bathtubs and teapots and then go home. There's a whole open space out there. Let's use it for more than stargazing, yeah?"

Brian's eyes are wide. "Oh," he says. He takes a tiny step closer to Pat, but it doesn't seem like he's scared. He might just be looking for reassurance. "Um, yeah, you're right. A big one sounds cool."

"Have you guys done a days-long ritual before, though?" asks Pat, eyes squinting suspiciously. "Last I checked you stuck with small stuff in general, which is the norm, if I can remind you. Everyone does that because they're not looking to fucking die."

"Yawn," answers Simone. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

"Jenna?" counters Pat, like Jenna's the boss, like Simone is some animal Jenna can rein in.

Jenna cannot rein Simone in. Never has been able to, and never really wanted to. Simone is not the kind of person who can be held back by antyhing, and if Jenna were to change that, then she'd be fundamentally changing Simone, which is an objectively messed up thing to do.

Still, she weighs the pros, the cons. "I think," she says finally, slow and measured, "that if we were ever going to try, now's a good time. We'll need to try something low risk, and I'll anchor it."

"Jenna," snaps Simone.

Jenna flips her off, tries to keep it lighthearted. "Simone," she chirps back. "That's my condition. Take it or leave it."

"What if it's not your domain?" counters Pat.

Jenna shrugs. "Let's pick something that works for me, then. Yeah? And if not, I'll learn. You guys will steady me, and it'll be fine."

Brian looks wary, glancing between all of their faces. "Why does anchoring sound so scary?"

"It's not," says Jenna. She ignores the unimpressed glares she gets from Pat and Simone. "Seriously, it's only dangerous if you do it wrong. If you're centered and around people you trust, there's no risk." She pauses, thinks for a moment. "Okay, a little bit of risk, but all of this shit has risk. It's fine, guys."

No one is enthused about the idea, and Pat and Simone try to argue some more, but they both back off after realizing that Jenna won't budge, and all the fighting is doing is freaking Brian out more. If Jenna's going to anchor, they all need to be steady, so the group resettles and disperses across the house to begin preparations.

And that's the end of that for the rest of the evening.

/

Jenna takes a long, hot shower that night. Simone is busy finding a ritual that will fit Jenna's long list of requirements and specifications, and Pat and Brian are...somewhere. Jenna doesn't really want to know, if she's being honest. Those two have spent so many weeks dancing around each other that it can only be grossly sweet when they collide.

She lathers the soap in her hands before rubbing it over her body. Arms and shoulders, then down to her fingertips. Hips, waist, up her sides. Legs, down to her feet. Over her back as best she can reach, and back around, over her breasts and up her chest to her neck.

Bathing has always been meditative for Jenna. After she first met Simone, she spend almost half an hour showering away the remnants of the forest floor. Hot water is a balm. The scent of her products has her muscles untensing.

Slow, always slow.

By the time she comes out, towel around her body and another compressing her hair, nearly the entire guest bathroom is foggy with steam. Simone is sitting on the bed, pencil tucked behind her ear, with some photocopies she'd made at the library and brought with her. "I thought you drowned in there," is Simone's familiar joke. She doesn't even look up to make it.

Jenna starts drying her hair with purpose. "Left you a towel."

Simone hums. An acknowledgement, at least. Maybe gratitude, maybe just understanding. It can be hard to tell sometimes, because Simone is so overtly expressive until she isn't. And then reading between her lines becomes the most difficult thing in the world. 

"You gonna write a book?" Simone asks, finally. "After all this? You could make a _preeeetty_ penny if you manage to essentially upend the rules of rituals as we know them."

"Maybe," posits Jenna. "That would be cool."

Simone nods, once, sharp. The line of her jaw is tight. Her mouth is a flat line.

Jenna scrubs at her face vigorously with the towel before putting it down. "You don't seem excited about that."

"You deserve to be successful," replies Simone, which isn't an answer. 

Though, admittedly, Jenna hadn't asked a question. They talk around each other. Sometimes Jenna only realizes they've done it hours after a conversation has ended. "What do you want for us?" she asks directly. It sets her heart pounding. "After we get back to New York, once this trip is over— if you were calling the shots, what would you do?"

"I'd walk into a bog and become a swamp person."

"Simone," chastises Jenna, but she smiles a little. "Seriously. I'm asking your opinion."

Simone's gaze is hard against the opposite wall. "I'd let Brian do more unsupervised magic. He's more resilient than you give him credit for, and he's pretty competent, too. I'd experiment more, all of us, with new ingredients. Stuff we haven't seen documented with properties in the books we have. And," she continues, breath hitching just a little, "I'd stay together. The four of us. The coven would stay intact."

Jenna mulls this over for a moment. "I was following until the end."

Unexpectedly, Simone looks up at the ceiling, and her eyes look suspiciously glossy. "We shouldn't break up," she says firmly. "I think that would be stupid, no offense."

"I think we're on different pages. Simone, where is this coming from?" Simone goes to answer, nostrils flaring, hands clenched at her sides, but Jenna presses forward, because she thinks she's starting to figure out where they misunderstood each other. "I know the coven should stay intact. I agree. I don't know why you think I wouldn't, that's what's confusing me."

"If you threw me out," says Simone, very quietly, "I don't know what would come next for me. I don't know where I'd go, or what I'd do."

Jenna sits next to her, still wearing a towel but not really caring right now. "You're capable," she says. "And you're strong, and you'd be fine. I mean it. But that doesn't matter, because no one's throwing you out. You think I built this thing with you just to toss it away? No chance. If I write a book, it'll be _with_ you, dumbass."

"I'm not a dumbass," protests Simone.

Jenna laughs. "Either way, we're sticking together. You weren't—" she pauses, has to unstick the words from the roof of her mouth before starting over— "You weren't the only one who was lonely when we met."

"I was the only one living in the woods, though."

Jenna shrugs theatrically. "I mean, you got me there." 

Simone grins, then, bumping their shoulders together, and something in her posture loosens. "Seriously, though, stop worrying about Brian so much. He's fine."

"Ugh," Jenna groans. "No, I know, I just don't want him to get overwhelmed."

"He's fine," repeats Simone, and in this moment she's so solid, so steadfast, so absolutely the person Jenna trusts most in the world. 

"Okay," she concedes. "Hey, I'd never leave you." It's uncomfortable to say, clunky and awkward in the air, but Jenna thinks it's necessary. Thinks maybe this talking in circles has only ever served to make them both dizzy. "You're the most important person to me. Fuck the— the accolades, or whatever. We're not doing this for glory. I'm doing it with you because it's the only place I want to be. And you're the person I wanna be doing it with. Yeah?"

"Yeah," answers Simone, very quietly. She brings a hand up to her face, quick, and swipes at the thin skin under her eyes. "Ugh, fuck. We done with feelings time?"

Jenna nods eagerly. "Oh, definitely. I just wanted to make sure you knew."

"I love you, you emotionally manipulative asshole."

Jenna grins at her. "I'm gonna put clothes on," she says, and she knows Simone hears what she means.

/

When Jenna was at boarding school, she was treated a bit like a leper. Most of the kids had what the teachers called "constructive powers." It turns out that being disruptive enough to get sent there, but not disruptive enough to be sent to what Jenna could only assume was some approximation of wizard jail, meant that your powers had to fit into a pretty narrow range of scale. Jenna was not the only one who was dangerous, but she was the only one that everyone else was at least a little bit afraid of.

Her nickname, which picked up steam a few weeks after she was admitted, was Killer.

Funny, since Jenna had never killed anyone, but someone caught wind of the fact that she may have accidentally hurt her roommate's plant. Just burned the edges. Just a little. But it was more than enough to sew the seeds of gossip, and from those seeds sprouted a legacy Jenna never asked for.

She's assigned a single room in a wing away from the students in her year. She's given different practicum for her exams, most of which require her to extinguish flames, and at first she can't manage it at all. (She fails every final practicum until she graduates, actually, but her grades are good enough to pull her through, which is an odd distinction to carry with her but not one she minds quite so much.) During lunch, she sits alone. At dinner, she sits alone. She skips breakfast most days, preferring to sit in her tiny room and toss a ball of flame from hand to hand.

It's about control, they tell her. If she's controlled enough, nothing can go wrong.

And then she meets Simone, and can't get a read on her at all. Knows Simone is lonely, probably, but that she's more scared of rejection than being alone. Knows that Simone is all about sweeping narrative, but doesn't care much for it herself. Wants to define her life on her own terms, in her own time. Wants to wrench back some of the agency that was stripped when her own family threw her to the wolves.

Jenna knows something about that.

"I can teach you," she'd told Simone one day, absentmindedly flicking some flames into the air. "You can show me more about magic, and I'll show you how to not need anyone."

"Won't I need you, then?" asked Simone over a cup of coffee, frown gracing her strong features.

Jenna paused. Looked around their studio apartment and its bare walls, all of the potential and none of the execution. "We'll need each other," she said. "No one else. And I'll teach how not to mourn the people who fucked you over."

"Sounds like a scam," Simone replied, and then, immediately, "yeah, sure, I'm in. Tell me about grief, Jenna Stoeber."

/

Jenna tells Simone about grief every day. It's not a process so much as something that permeates their every conversation and interaction thereafter. 

In every discussion of coven, there is a shadow that sits in the periphery. When they fold in Pat, Simone almost begs Jenna not to the last night before he moves in officially. Gets halfway through a hazy-eyed rant about why he could ruin everything before she manages to rein herself in. There's still a slight bump in the carpet in their ground floor studio apartment where the very earth itself had risen and tried to join the conversation. _He'll be good for us_, Jenna remembers saying, and Simone had begrudgingly agreed. It helps that she and Pat get on like, well, excuse Jenna's pun, a house on fire.

It's grief when they're grocery shopping. It's the strange urge to count your belongings once a day, make sure nothing's gone missing. When Simone showers, she locks the door. Jenna hadn't been raised to do that, but she learned, and the two of them tiptoe around each other as often as they slam through each other's carefully constructed walls. It goes unspoken, but it lingers. The grief of lost potential, of something that never was.

They talk about it outright, too, but only in the dark.

Tonight, in this cabin in Arizona, after they've finished getting ready for bed, Simone puts down the huge book and turns off the bedside lamp. Jenna turns onto her side, nuzzling into the pillow, and waits.

Sure enough, Simone begins to speak, slowly at first but gaining momentum as she goes. "I think I was fifteen when I realized I didn't want to fall in love the same way other people do. Everyone kept talking about how fun it was to have a crush, and how I needed to ask someone to the winter formal dance, and if I did I couldn't wear heels so that boys would like me more... it was so stupid, and I thought it was all so childish. My dream wedding was more about having someone to help me with chores, not some sappy shit. Vows? I'd rather die, you know? And as I got older, I didn't grow out of that. I wanted a partner, not someone to buy me flowers or whatever. It's never been about gushy romance for me, and I tried to explain it but the words kept coming out wrong. I just wanted something that wasn't gonna fall apart in my hands. Something stable, I guess, and equal, and honest. But nobody got that."

Jenna hums to show she's listening.

"I think you get it," continues Simone, very quietly.

Simone is not waiting for an answer, Jenna thinks. So she doesn't say anything back. Doesn't know what she could possibly say to share how that makes her feel, not butterfly-frantic but steady, grounded. Maybe she and Simone both have just been looking for something to be sure of.

As she falls asleep, Jenna presses her smile into her pillow and thinks about this fucking wonderful thing they've built together. 

/

They wake up to yelling in the kitchen.

Jenna startles, bolt upright in bed before she even knows why, and sees Simone doing the same in the opposite bed. "What's happening?" she asks.

Simone shrugs, eyes a little swollen from sleep, expression close to a grimace. It's early based on the lack of sunlight coming in through their shared window, or maybe still late. "Fuck if I know," Simone manages eventually. Her voice croaks.

Jenna sighs and gets up to investigate, and that's when she realizes what's going on.

"I don't have to tell you everything that's going in my head!" Brian is shouting.

He barely gets the sentence out before Pat is tripping over the end of it to defend himself. "That's not what I'm asking! But it would be fucking nice if every once in a while you'd be honest about how you're feeling. Just once, even! It would be nice not to have to worry about you losing your shit every two seconds!'

"God, fuck off, like you're so well adjusted!"

"I'm better adjusted than you!"

"Stop with the self-righteous bullshit! I know you think I'm incompetent, but I'm not, so you can stop worrying about me, Pat."

"I'm not worried because I think you're incompetent!"

"Then why?"

"Because I'm fucking in love with you, asshole!"

Jenna freezes where she'd been creeping toward the door, the entire house going completely, terrifyingly silent.

Simone snorts a laugh. "Finally," she says. "Come on, we should make sure one of them doesn't try to flee the state." She's getting up easily, kicking her long legs over the side of the bed, nightgown billowing dramatically around her as she stretches her arms up over her head. "Coming?"

Jenna blinks at her, blinks again. "Yeah," she says after a moment, "yeah, let's do that."

Brian and Pat are standing across from each other, island between them, and both of their eyes snap to Jenna and Simone when they enter. Jenna rubs at her eyes, squinting against the overhead light. "Morning," she says. "Y'all were pretty loud, FYI. So I don't think it really makes sense to pretend we couldn't hear you, because we heard approximately everything. You okay?"

Brian's face is lit up in a hectic flush, and Pat looks halfway to dissociated. 

"Cool," says Jenna. "Good talk. Can we go back to sleep? We can talk about it in the morning, but it's five in the goddamn morning, and I think the two of you need to, um, process this when you're not so riled up."

Brian looks back at Pat. "Do you mean it?" he asks.

"Ah, fuck it," mutters Simone. She raises her voice to talk to Brian and Pat, who looks like he's short circuiting. "We're going to bed. If you're loud again, I'll kill you. Got it, lovebirds?"

"Noted," says Brian.

Pat nods, which is probably the best they're going to get from him right now.

"Great," continues Simone. She wraps her fingers around Jenna's wrist and tugs her back toward the bedroom. "I wish they'd gotten their shit together at a time that's not ass o'clock, but hopefully there's less weird tension now."

"Hopefully," echoes Jenna. "We'll find out in the morning, I guess."

"Stop worrying," complains Simone. "They're big boys, they'll figure it out."

Jenna can't help a wry smile. "I thought you were the one constantly analyzing every threat to the coven. Not me."

"The coven isn't a threat to itself," says Simone. They're back in their room now, door shut so the light from outside doesn't get in beyond a dim strip at the bottom of the doorway. Simone lets go of Jenna's wrist. "God, I know this is supposedly the witching hour, but I hate my life right now."

Jenna burrows back under the covers of her own bed. "Witching hour's three, not five," she says muzzily.

"Hm?"

"Three," she repeats, now mostly nonsensical, and the last thing she hears before she falls back asleep is Simone's gently mocking, fond laughter.

/

The preparation for the ritual happens over the next three and a half days. Throughout, they wake up early and fall asleep late, each of them more or less in their own world. Jenna has been brewing tea for what feels like years when, on the last day of prep and the penultimate day of their stay, Brian walks over and tells her, "Hey, I'm done."

"Everything's separated and labeled?"

"Yup," agrees Brian. "Finished it half an hour ago."

Jenna nods. She wants to tease him about that, make some quip of him running off to make out with Pat before telling her, but this feels too big to temper with jokes. "Grab the others. We'll review in ten and start right after."

Brian nods, hair floppy, eyes wide. He looks very inch the kid that Jenna picked up almost entirely by accident in the restricted section of his university's library, but there's a steel in him that wasn't there before, a confidence, an assurance.

Or maybe it was there, she posits. Simone had seen it, after all. Maybe Jenna was the one who was scared.

Brian leaves soon after, and Jenna stirs the wooden spoon, twine wrapped twice counter-clockwise around the mid-point of the handle, to make the herbs dance in the tea. For protection, she insists with every motion she makes. For bravery, for success, for joy. For the joy, especially; it's hard to savor it when it comes, considering the way each and every one of them had grown up always expecting the other shoe to drop, but Jenna thinks they're getting better at it.

Ten minutes later finds them all outside just as the sun is beginning to set. "It's only four thirty," Simone complains, shielding her eyes against the orange light angled right at them.

"Shortest day of the year," comments Pat. "Only up from here."

"Well," says Brian, "until the summer solstice. And then it's down again."

Pat snorts, rolling his eyes with so much fondness Jenna thinks they must have figured their shit out, even if she never got an update after that shouting match. "Yeah, yeah, nature is beautiful and everything moves in cycles, we get it, Gilbert."

Brian beams and pokes Pat in the cheek, and Pat barely recoils. Yeah, they're just fine.

While they'd been getting a lay of the land, Jenna had been busying herself putting all of the components in their proper places. Simone had finished the chalk mapping this morning, and it sprawls gorgeous and intricate across the driveway. Each element is connected, and its entirety is the same size of the dictated map expanded threefold, with a space in the middle for Jenna where it all overlaps like a Venn diagram.

"Let's run through everything one last time," says Jenna, taking a slow lap around the map and examining it with a critical eye. "Pat, your part?"

Pat nods and begins walking with her. "Lightbringer," he says, mostly for dramatic effect, and then laughs at himself and runs a hand through his hair. "I'm powering this baby, essentially. Pulling light and energy forward, trying to keep it contained to right here, and keeping an eye on anything that might go wrong."

"Good," says Jenna. "Brian?"

"Ramping up the wetness," he says. Simone pulls a face, and Jenna whacks him in the arm. His unreptentent grin doesn't fade, but he does pull himself together a little. "It's so dry out here that we're not sure how the conditions will work, since this ritual seems to have been created somewhere in the American South, potentially even in Florida. I'll be raising humidity levels without bringing down any rain, because _Brian, I swear to God, this chalk is not waterproof, and I'll strangle your twink ass myself if—"_

"Oookay!" says Simone brightly, clapping her hands together as she interrupts Brian. "Great, my turn?"

Jenna waves a hand at her to go ahead.

Simone smiles, and there's something sharp in it, something dangerous. An edge of the power she wields seeping through to the surface, always seeking and grasping. She wears it well. "I'm gonna blow this whole thing open, essentially."

"Hot," comments Brian, and Simone steps on his foot.

"I'm gonna cause a teeny tiny earthquake below us. Pat will warn us exactly when it's coming, because I won't be able to control it fully, and I'll be pulling from Jenna's energy, too. I mean," she corrects, "we all will, but me especially. And then, once the ground is shaking, I'll be pulling it up, and breaking the map in specific places. In order. If it works, every fucking flower in a thirty mile radius is gonna burst into full bloom. Every tree will bear fruit, every sapling will mature. It'll be a— a—"

"Greenhouse bonanza," supplies Pat.

"Sure," agrees Simone amicably. "That. We put some houseplants inside by the window, so we should be able to tell if it works."

"Everyone ready?" asks Jenna.

Simone narrows her eyes. "Well, tell us about your part."

Jenna sighs. "I'm a conduit. The anchor. You pull from me, and I keep us steady. I might pass out after, so no one freak out if that happens. It just means I'm drained."

"We won't drain you," offers Brian, quieter now, somber. "Not if we can help it."

"Thanks," says Jenna, only a little bit wry. "I'll yell or signal otherwise if I need to be pulled out, but I trust y'all. Just feel it out, and trust yourselves too. This is gonna be awesome."

"Fuck yeah!" cheers Simone, and she grabs both Jenna's and Pat's wrists and thrusts them overhead, both of her arms up, radiant, transcendent. "Let's do this!"

"Go team," agrees Brian.

And then the only thing that's left to do is to take their places.

Jenna steps into the center, stands with her palms out, and shuts her eyes. Turning herself into a conduit isn't something Jenna's done before, but the book they pulled this ritual from seemed insistent that the only thing Jenna needs to do is _open herself to the possibility of being the anchor_, and that the rest would come naturally. It's awkward at first, but then Simone begins to chant, and Jenna feels a tentative tug at her magic.

Oh, she thinks. She identifies the presence as Brian immediately, and relaxes into it. He siphons just a little bit, using it to draw in the humidity and keep it stable, and she hums to herself.

It progresses from there, Pat and Simone taking bits as well, and Jenna feels pulled in each direction, a balance, a trinity. It does feel divine, which is not something she ever thought she'd feel about the way she practices magic. It had always been about practicality, and a bit about fun. Never about connection to something deeper unless that deeper thing was inside of herself. Now, each of them is a well. If Jenna really wanted, she could take all of her magic back from them and then some. Maybe this is why casting together is dangerous. Maybe this is why Pat was so upset about Jenna suggesting the idea.

None of that matters now.

Jenna feels the ground shake, and sees light flare up behind her closed lids. She hears Simone _yell_, and feels her own knees turn to water. Jenna holds on, balanced on her skinned knees and hands flat against the ground as it buckles and heaves. "I'm fine!" she shouts preemptively, and _feels_ the way Pat sends some magic back her way. His own is teetering just at the edge of stability, so she pushes back, and smiles when there's resistance. Stubborn asshole. "I'm fine," she repeats, and waits for him to acquiesce.

"Five more minutes, Jenna," Simone calls.

Jenna nods. Keeps her eyes shut.

Time goes slippery at that point. She feels the humidity curling the baby hairs around her face, and the little pulls on her magic as Pat reads ahead. He must not find anything alarming, because the ritual progresses. No issues. Just the steady rumble of Simone's voice, occasionally lost under the overturn of the earth.

Anchoring is not like she expected. She didn't think she would feel so present or grounded in the moment, but it's like every single cell in Jenna's body is determined to experience every ounce of sensation, internal and external, that there is to glean from this ritual. It's cold out here, shiver-inducing. None of them are dressed for it, and then that thought slips away too. Brian is steady as a rock. Pat, Jenna thinks from the feel of him, must be smiling.

"We're done!"

And Simone—

Jenna opens her eyes as the ritual ends. She looks to the house first, and sees plants spilling over their pots, lush and green and perfect. Successful. 

And then Jenna whips her head back around to look at her coven, and Simone is standing there in her nightgown, up to her elbows in crumbling earth, eyes bright, fierce laughter echoing through the wide open desert around them.

In full bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. <3


End file.
